The Real Adventure eBook

It was obvious to her that this quality was destroying
whatever slim chance for success they had. The
lines, with the new ugly twist that had been imparted
to them, might draw a half dozen rude guffaws from
different parts of the audience, but the chill disfavor
with which they were received by the rest of the house,
must, she felt, have been apparent to everybody.
There seemed, though, to be a superstition that a
laugh was a sacred thing; something to be fed carefully
with more of the same thing that had originally produced
it. This treatment was persisted in, despite
the fact that the audiences shrank and shriveled and
the box-office receipts, she gathered from the gossip
of the company, hung just about at the minimum required
to keep them going.

What troubled her was her own apathetic acceptance
of it all. Just as her ear seemed to have grown
dull to the offenses that nightly were committed against
it on the stage, and to the leering response, which
was all they ever got from across the footlights, so
her spirit submitted tamely to the prospect of failure.
She hardly seemed to herself the same person who had
set to work in a blaze of eager enthusiasm, on the
part she played so mechanically now.

She tried to reassure herself with the reflection
that the tour meant nothing to her, except as it fell
in with an ulterior purpose, and that it was actually
serving that purpose well enough. She’d
deliberately turned aside from the main channel of
her new life to give mind and soul a rest they needed.
When she’d got that rest and rallied her courage,
she’d take a fresh start. She had, lying
safely in the bank in Chicago, where Galbraith had
taken her, something over two hundred dollars; for
she’d lived thriftily during the Chicago engagement
and had added a little every week to her nest-egg
of profit from the costuming business. So she
had enough to get her to New York and see her through
the process of finding a new job. What sort of
job it would be, she was still too tired to think,
but she was sure she could find something.

Meantime, out there on the road, she was making no
effort to save. She indulged in whatever small
ameliorations to their daily discomforts her weekly
wage would run to.

It was thus that matters stood with her, when, with
the rest of the company, she arrived in Dubuque on
a Wednesday morning, with an hour or so to spare before
the matinee.

CHAPTER XVI

ANTI-CLIMAX

It was a beastly day. A gusty rain, whipping
up from the south, by way of answer to the challenge
of a heavy snowfall the day before, inflicted a combination
of the rigors of winter, with a debilitating, disquieting
hint of spring. The train, for which they had
been routed out that morning at seven o’clock,
had been blistering hot and the necessarily open windows
had let in choking clouds of smoke.

The hotel was hot, too. Rose and Dolly, as soon
as they had registered, went up to their room and
washed off the stains of travel, as well as they could
in translucent water that was the color of weak coffee.
Then Rose, in a kimono, stretched out on the bed to
make up some of the rest their early departure from
Cedar Rapids had deprived her of. She did this
methodically whenever opportunity offered, but without
any great conviction.